Dr Paul Allen

The longer you fight against your sin, the more temptations you may face to no longer fight so hard. Once, perhaps, your zeal burned, your spiritual blood boiled. But as months passed and years passed, desires for a more comfortable Christianity were somehow wedged beneath your armour. Paul talks of killing sin and starving sin (Romans 8:13; 13:14), but you have begun to wonder whether a less decisive, more long-term approach may work just as well. Jesus speaks of tearing out an eye and cutting off a hand (Matthew 5:29) — you theoretically agree but, if honest, can hardly imagine self-denial so extreme. You may have once found relish in the righteous ferocity of a man like John Owen, who wrote of walking “over the bellies of his lusts” (Works, 6:14). But some time has passed since your boots have trampled your lusts. And as another Puritan once put it, you may feel tempted to speak of your sins as Lot did of Zoar: “Is it, not a little one?” (Genesis 19:20). Time makes way for many litt...

We tend to project our natural expectations about who God is onto him instead of fighting to let the Bible surprise us into what God himself says. Perhaps nowhere in the Bible is that point made more clearly than in  Isaiah 55 . “There is nothing that troubles our consciences more,” said John Calvin in this passage, “than when we think that God is like ourselves.” When life takes a difficult turn, Christians often remind others, with a shrug, “His ways are not our ways”—communicating the mysteries of divine providence by which he orchestrates events in ways that surprise us.  The mysterious depth of divine providence is, of course, a precious biblical truth. But the passage in which we find “his ways are not our ways” comes from   Isaiah 55 . And in context, it means something quite different. It is a statement not of the surprise of God’s mysterious providence but of the surprise of God’s compassionate heart. The full passage goes like this: Seek the Lord while he may be...

Nothing is more practical than the doctrine of providence, for it engenders both faith and godly fear. When Christ teaches us how to deal with anxiety, He reminds us that God the Father feeds every little bird and clothes every flower with its lovely colours (Matt. 6:25–30). How much more, then, should we trust Him to care for His own beloved children? Whether one is willing to admit it or not, everyone constantly lives in the presence of the living God. The more the believer is conscious of God’s providence, the more it can be said of him, as B.B. Warfield wrote, “Everywhere he sees God in His mighty stepping, everywhere he feels the working of His mighty arm, the throbbing of His mighty heart.” God is in control. While we cannot fully plumb the depths of God’s ways, we can still affirm that “of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory forever” (Rom. 11:36, KJV throughout). There are many things for which we do not know the reason, but for everything, we know...

In his book, The Way of the (Modern) World : or, Why It’s Tempting to Live as If God Doesn’t Exist, Craig Gay observes that one of the major preoccupations that define modern culture is the quest for control.  “The desire to maintain autonomous control over reality by rational-technical means is particularly central to the modern world.…[A] modern society is one in which the prevailing conception of the human task in the world is that of mastery by way of systematic manipulation.” Francis Bacon’s assertion that knowledge is power may well serve as a slogan for modern culture.  To be modern is to believe that we can bring nature and history under our dominion. Systems of all kinds — political, economic, technical, educational, even spiritual — have been designed by modern men and women to extend and ensure that control. Of course, the desire to run the cosmos is nothing new. One of the irrational symptoms of human sinfulness from the very beginning is the belief...